Princeton University Press
The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution
Key Metrics
- Yuri Slezkine
- Princeton University Press
- Hardcover
- 9780691176949
- 9.5 X 6.25 X 2.25 inches
- 3.35 pounds
- History > Russia & the Former Soviet Union
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destruction
The House of Government is unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment. Written in the tradition of Tolstoy's War and Peace, Grossman's Life and Fate, and Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, Yuri Slezkine's gripping narrative tells the true story of the residents of an enormous Moscow apartment building where top Communist officials and their families lived before they were destroyed in Stalin's purges. A vivid account of the personal and public lives of Bolshevik true believers, the book begins with their conversion to Communism and ends with their children's loss of faith and the fall of the Soviet Union.
Completed in 1931, the House of Government, later known as the House on the Embankment, was located across the Moscow River from the Kremlin. The largest residential building in Europe, it combined 505 furnished apartments with public spaces that included everything from a movie theater and a library to a tennis court and a shooting range. Slezkine tells the chilling story of how the building's residents lived in their apartments and ruled the Soviet state until some eight hundred of them were evicted from the House and led, one by one, to prison or their deaths.
Drawing on letters, diaries, and interviews, and featuring hundreds of rare photographs, The House of Government weaves together biography, literary criticism, architectural history, and fascinating new theories of revolutions, millennial prophecies, and reigns of terror. The result is an unforgettable human saga of a building that, like the Soviet Union itself, became a haunted house, forever disturbed by the ghosts of the disappeared.
Author Bio
Yuri Slezkine is Jane K. Sather Professor of History at University California Berkley Department of History.
Professor Slexkine has published six books covering Russia, Soviet Union and Siberia.
The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution(link is external) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017)
The Jewish Century(link is external) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War(link is external), edited by Sheila Fitzpatrick and Yuri Slezkine (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000).
Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North(link is external) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).
"The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism," Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 414-452.
Between Heaven and Hell: The Myth of Siberia in Russian Culture, ed. by Galya Diment and Yuri Slezkine (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993).
Research Interests
Late Modern Europe: Russia
- Education
MA, University of Moscow - PhD, University of Texas, Austin
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